Asylum Part 19

I knew then that her recovery was properly beginning, that she had let go of Edgar and allowed herself to start dealing with the death of Charlie. What remained now was to work through the guilt. I was confident that while this would be painful it would be straightforward, and relatively quick, at least in the initial, acute phase. After that there would be no point keeping her here; she could hardly be considered a danger to society. This being so, it was time for me to consider her future: to think about what was going to happen to her in a month or so when she was well enough to leave the hospital, and who was going to look after her.

A few days later I drove up to north Wales to discuss my plans with Max Raphael. Poor man, he didn't want this visit, he had no desire to have me see how he lived. He hadn't given up his job in Cledwyn, nor had he moved out of Trevor Williams's house, but I had the sense that he'd turned into something of a recluse.

I arrived at Plas Mold in the early afternoon and the house, the yard, the fields beyond, all were much as Stella had described them. The Beast was barking, the manure was thick in the nostrils and deeply unpleasant. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of Trevor Williams himself, that barnyard Lothario, but there was no sign of either him or his wife. Max shuffled out of his back door in shirtsleeves and suspenders and bedroom slippers and asked me in. He was thin as a rail. He looked utterly defeated. He led me through the spotlessly neat kitchen and up the stairs to the sitting room, which had now become his study. He offered me a gla.s.s of sherry.

The room was spartan in the extreme. No paintings, no radio, no television set, merely an armchair, a few shelves of books, and a desk at the far end looking out over the valley. As he poured me a drink I rose from the armchair and went to the window, though it was not the view that interested me, I was drawn by the cl.u.s.ter of framed photographs he kept on his desk. Most were of Charlie alone, a couple of Charlie with his father. I lifted one to the light. Max appeared at my elbow and gave me my sherry, and together we gazed at his son. I murmured the obvious, that there was no photograph of Stella in evidence.

He sighed. He waved me toward the armchair and turned his desk chair to face me. "No," he said, "no Stella."

I told him I saw no point in beating about the bush and said what it was that I'd come to say. He was only slightly surprised. I know what happens to psychiatrists like Max, men whose lives have gone horribly wrong and for whom their own suffering becomes a source of fascination, every provincial mental hospital has at least one. They continue to function, competently if not energetically, but they are bowed by what seems a great burden of experience, their own and their patients'. They lose all spontaneity and humor and respond to pathology with a sensitivity too acute to permit them any distance from what they see and hear on the wards every day. They blur the line between sickness and sanity and, Christ-like, suffer for all humanity. They can never again be refreshed and they begin to read philosophy, usually of a mystical stripe. This was Max. With an air of gloom and preoccupation he said he presumed Stella was getting on well in the hospital, and I briefly gave him the clinical picture.

He nodded a few times and then sank again into silent frowning reflection. "I think," he said at last, "you must be careful."

Caution acquires great importance for burnt-out cases like Max. "Careful?" I said.

"I hardly dare presume to advise you," he said, and there was a brief, leaden hint of irony in his voice. "You are her doctor, after all. I am merely"-dry cough here-"her husband."

I waited for more. It was slow in coming. It occurred to me that he didn't have long to live. I wondered if he had cancer.

"She brought him into the house, you know."

I said nothing, thinking: if this man were my patient I'd have him on antidepressants.

"She should be in prison."

"You're still very angry, of course."

"Don't patronize me, Peter. I know what I'm talking about. But I suppose"-another dry cough-"we must look after our own."

"Which is what I intend to do."

"You have my blessing. But I warn you."

Another excruciating silence.

"Of what?"

"Perfidy. Mendacity."

He sounded like a Jesuit. But I had what I wanted. I murmured something noncommittal and rose to my feet. But he hadn't finished. He took off his spectacles and began to polish them on his handkerchief. "Not that it matters," he said. "It's Stark you're after."

"They are both in my care."

He glanced up at me but said nothing more.

In the yard he stuck his hands in his pockets and shivered in the wind. He looked up at the sky and said, "One struggles with shame every day. The hardest thing is taking responsibility."

As I drove away he was still standing there, in the wind, with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the sky I saw clearly what had happened to him. He had turned his punitive tendencies in on himself and was slowly putting himself to death. He had no real interest in Stella anymore.

When I next saw her I told her I was so pleased with her progress that I was thinking of writing to the Home Office about a release date for her; not immediately, of course, but some time in the future. She was guarded in the reaction she showed me, for her pleasure had to be tempered with grief. We talked very much like old friends now. I announced one day that we need not meet on the ward anymore, and the next afternoon she was escorted to my office in the Administration Block. There was no point in keeping her in the dark about my intentions any longer.

I greeted her at the door and told the attendant to come back in an hour. The superintendent's office is the best in the hospital, a large, high-ceilinged room that gives the impression of a chamber in a gentlemen's club, all polished wood and old leather in tones of black, brown, and oxblood. There's a conference table at one end and a big desk at the other, and behind the desk high windows with a deep view over the terraces and the countryside beyond.

Stella drifted around the room and commented on its strong air of male cultivation. The walls were paneled in dark wood and hung with paintings and prints, some the hospital's but most from my own collection. She noticed several pictures familiar to her from my house, and stood before them as though reacquainting herself with old friends.

"You remember this one," I murmured, standing close beside her and indicating a small Italian still life that she'd always loved.

"Oh yes," she said.

She wandered to the bookshelves and found alongside the standard psychiatric texts several shelves of literature. She pulled out a volume of poetry and was leafing through it when she heard a familiar sound, one she had sorely missed in the last weeks, the clink of bottle and gla.s.s. She turned and saw me setting a bottle of gin and a couple of gla.s.ses on my desk.

"Would you like a drink?"

She stood there with the book in her hands and I could see her rolling the question around in her mind as though it were wine of a good vintage. It was a question to be savored without haste. She smiled.

"Gin and tonic?" I said. "I always have one around this time."

"I should love a gin and tonic, Peter."

"Good."

Nothing was said about the wisdom of giving alcohol to a patient, we behaved as though it were the most natural thing in the world, two civilized people having a drink together in the middle of the afternoon.

"Sit down," I said, waving at the chairs ranged in a semicircle around my desk. She settled into a comfortable wing chair upholstered in maroon leather and I sat beside her, and together we gazed out across the terraces at the large sky with its rags and pillows of driven white cloud. Barely were we settled than the phone rang, and I rather irritably agreed to see someone in an hour. I sat back frowning.

"I shouldn't have taken the job," I said. "Running this place is most definitely not my sort of thing at all."

"I wouldn't have thought it was," she said.

"I'm frankly not very good at it."

"Oh, I'm sure you're perfectly competent," she said, "but with all the administration you don't do enough psychiatry. You should, you know."

"All the same, I think I might retire."

"Peter!"

"Does that surprise you? I don't see why I'm not so decrepit that I can't still write. And decide what to do about my garden, which is starting to look positively Russian. Why not?"

"But you must have wanted the job when you applied for it."

She had begun to sense that all this was leading up to something, some kind of dramatic revelation.

"Oh, I think everyone understood that I was merely a stopgap. They all a.s.sumed that when Jack went Max would take over. He was the obvious choice."

A pause; she said nothing.

"But no, it was not to be," I said briskly, "so they asked me to look after the place until they could find someone for the long term. I think I've given them enough time. If I stay much longer my anxiety will become chronic. Have you been thinking at all about Max?"

She was willing to talk about Max. She said she wished he could have been direct with her, after Edgar, and told her what he felt. Not behaved in bad faith. Perhaps they could have cleared the air, found a way of living together. Perhaps then Charlie- Pause here. Drop the head. Lapse into silence. From me, a sort of sympathetic grunt. It was a lovely spring day, sunny and mild, and there was a cool breeze through the open window. A group of patients tramped along the terrace in yellow corduroys and work boots, their jackets slung over their shoulders. Their voices drifted faintly into the room. On the wall my clock ticked. I was being pa.s.sive, receptive.

"Go on," I murmured.

"Oh, I don't know what I feel now. I wish he'd never met me. Have you talked to Brenda?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"Still deeply distressed, as you can imagine. She's under the care of her own doctor."

"How she must hate me."

"I don't think so. She'll survive, as you will. Tragedy isn't as rare a feature of life as we sometimes imagine."

She managed a small smile. "I'm glad the outlook isn't too bleak."

That small smile told me that now was the moment. I am past sixty. I shall retire soon. I have fifteen good years left, with luck, and I do not want to spend them alone. It had occurred to me some days earlier that after she left the hospital Stella should come and live with me. There were many advantages to such an arrangement, from my point of view. She was a cultured, beautiful woman. She understood how I lived and would find such an existence agreeable. Art, travel, gardening, and books, these were the interests we shared. She would bring light and grace into my quiet house and my measured life. I could see her in those elegant rooms. I felt I could share them with her. We would talk, I would come to know her. Understand her affair with Edgar.

She, in turn, would find comfort with me. Safety. Asylum. I said this to her.

"Asylum?"

She was astonished. She stood up and walked to the far end of the room, leaned against the wall and looked at me as I sat there still gazing out of the window with my back to her. One thing emerged clearly enough from the turmoil and she said it.

"But I'm still married to Max!"

Now I turned in my chair.

"I've been to see Max," I said. "He'll let you go."

"Oh, he will."

I nodded.

Suddenly she found it all hilarious. A romantic proposition from the medical superintendent, with her husband's complicity, what an afternoon she was having. She felt like a consignment of damaged but retrievable womanhood, in the process of being transferred from old owner to new, after being stored for a while in a warehouse. She put her hand over her mouth and stared at me as the laughter silently swept through her and made her shoulders shake. She didn't stop until I led her back to her chair, where she clutched my jacket and pressed her face into my shoulder. After a moment or two she brought herself under control. She let go of my jacket and made use of a handkerchief I produced from my breast pocket. She patted her hair then reached for her drink.

"I must look a sight. Please don't sedate me."

"You don't want anything?"

"I don't need it."

She was working with her compact and lipstick, repairing the damage.

"I must say," she murmured, peering at her face in the little mirror, "you've an unusual way of delivering bad news."

"This is bad news?"

"I mean Max. Letting me go."

She p.r.o.nounced the words with heavy irony.

"I know you don't love me," I said, "but I think you need me, you do at the moment anyway. I'd be prepared to gamble on that changing. Your affection for me deepening."

Another silence.

I sensed her pity then. The poor man, I imagined her thinking. She smiled slightly. She wasn't taking me altogether seriously. But she behaved herself. She turned her gla.s.s in her fingers and gazed at it from lowered eyes as the sun caught the crystal facets and threw off tiny splinters of light. She lifted her eyebrows. She knew I was watching her.

"Are you a very pa.s.sionate man, Peter?" she murmured.

"I think perhaps that's something we would have to discover," I said gently. I put a faint stress on the "we." I was telling her there would be nothing she didn't choose. She became aware that I was still talking.

"What?"

"You can imagine it, then?" I said.

She wandered down to the bookcase and ran a finger along the spines. I am the woman of sorrows, said her back, I am deep water, I am grief, my soul is torn and bleeding, will you touch the wound? A small silence. He won't do it, she told herself, he won't tear me open; and I didn't. I let the silence continue as she returned to her chair. At last she spoke.

"You'd be taking on rather an injured bird, you know."

"I'm good with injured birds."

"If I married you-"

Oh, and my face, she said, was suddenly suffused with tenderness! What a delightful sight it was, and what good it did her, to see that tenderness! She smiled and put her hand on mine where it lay on the desk. Her eyes searched my face, absorbing every last flickering ember of feeling she had aroused in me.

"When would we do it?"

"July."

"I won't be here?"

I shook my head.

"It would be quiet, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, it would be quiet."

Now she gazed at me with a look that said, If only it were so simple. I read the thought.

"It's perfectly easy."

She pressed my hand.

"Dear Peter," she said, though I suspect she was still thinking, Poor Peter. She sank back into her chair.